Who's More Biased, Left or Right?
In politics, both sides think the other is biased - and both sides are right
In this post, I’d like to tell you about one of my favorite papers of the last few years: a 2018 meta-analysis looking at partisan bias and whether it’s stronger on one side than the other. Hope you enjoy it!
The Big Picture
When it comes to politics, both sides think the other side is more biased than their own. Liberals think that conservatives are more biased; conservatives think that liberals are more biased.1
Is either side actually right? Many social scientists would say yes, liberals are right: Conservatives are generally more biased.
At the same time, plenty of research in psychology suggests that no one is immune to motivated reasoning and other cognitive distortions, and thus that we might expect to find partisan bias on both sides of the political aisle.
Psychologist Peter Ditto and colleagues conducted a thorough meta-analysis to try to settle the issue once and for all. Their results strongly supported what they called the symmetry hypothesis: Not only are both sides biased, but both are about as biased as the other.
Ironically, the fact that many researchers studying partisan bias have been adamant that conservatives are more biased than liberals seems to be an example of partisan bias.
That’s the big picture; now, let’s dig into the details…